Outcome Documents for
200 Years of Johnson v. M’Intosh (JvM): Indigenous Responses to the Religious Foundations of Racism
This website is the official archive of the outcome publications from the Henry J. Luce Foundation Grant Funded project “200 Years of Johnson v. M’Intosh (JvM): Indigenous Responses to the Religious Foundations of Racism". Professor Philip P. Arnold was the PI on this project which ran from 2022-2024. Project activities included a conference, podcasts, and various types of publications.
Summary
“200 Years of Johnson v. M’Intosh (JvM): Indigenous Responses to the Religious Foundations of Racism,” is a collaborative initiative made possible through relationships developed over 30 years between academic and Indigenous communities. At its core, the project seeks to interrogate and critically examine connections between the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (DOCD), the Catholic Papal Bulls that undergird the Doctrine, and the Doctrine’s pernicious influence on United States Indian Law today.
The 200th anniversary of JvM provides an excellent moment to challenge the theology and jurisprudence of DOCD and this critical Supreme Court decision. The project will deliver a range of digital products and written works combined with a host of public outreach activities to raise awareness about the harmful impacts of the DOCD and provide support for a global movement of Indigenous People’s that seek to repudiate it.
Did Pope Alexander VI Authorize England’s Colonization of North America?
Shortly before Thanksgiving 2016, Episcopalian priest John Floberg held up a copy of Pope Alexander VI’s 1493 papal bull Inter caetera before a crowd of hundreds of protesters and clerics at North Dakota’s Oceti Sakowin Camp. He asked a committee of Indigenous elders to authorize its burning. They did, the paper went up in flames, and the crowd erupted in applause.
Matthew Cavedon
Haaland v. Brackeen and the Logic of Discovery
In 1823, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision in Johnson v M’Intosh, the first of the Marshall trilogy, infamous for its attack on Indigenous sovereignty. Two hundred years later, it seems as if things are different — indeed, it seems as if things are better — for Indigenous peoples in the United States. We have a Laguna Pueblo woman Secretary of the Interior, an investigation into the horrors of Native American boarding schools has resulted in a report for the first time in U.S. history, and the government has even acknowledged the genocide of Indigenous peoples (8). However, some argue that Haaland v. Brackeen, which the Supreme Court is getting ready to decide this term, is threatening to inflict the biggest blow to Indigenous sovereignty since Johnson. What are they worried about?
Dana Lloyd
The Contemporary Presence of Discovery’s Assertion in Canada
any groups and organizations have taken actions to repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery. In an opinion piece published in Canada’s Globe and Mail in Aug 2022, Douglas Sanderson asserts that the Doctrine of Discovery had little influence on the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the French and English who treated Indigenous nations as equals. The Doctrine of Discovery seeks to explain how European nations dispossessed Indigenous peoples of their land and rights. Sanderon claims that giving force to the Doctrine of Discovery (which he understands as an American legal fiction) in Canada misrepresents Indigenous history. Further, Mr. Sanderson explains that after the invention of this doctrine which, “neatly explained Indigenous dispossession in a sentence or two” no one cared about the past and “the story of relationships based in diplomacy and alliance slipped almost from memory.”
Mark Tremblay
Order, Economy, and Legality:Johnson v. M’Intosh after Two Hundred Years
Mother Earth is the wellspring of indigenous culture, religion, and economic life. It forms the identity of Native Americans as indigenous peoples.rom the beginning, the appropriation and distribution of Indigenous land had to be orderly. Settler-colonists needed a system to avoid haphazard, disorganized tribal land transactions and achieve their goal of the private commodification of the expanding American frontier.
Andrew Little
